Thoughts on "The Great Resignation"?

[erikagautney]

America's Obsession With Being Productive Is Hurting Mental Health

• A simple side-effect of the pandemic?
• Or is it symptomatic of a deeper problem endemic to 21st century capitalist culture?

As someone who is in a highly competitive field + who personally happened to be a productivity nerd long before I decided to go down this career path (I can tell you how many pomodorii I allocated for TWS today vs how many of those cycles I spent on R&D. That's right, that's how geeked out I can get on the daily about efficiency and time+task management) I can definitely relate to some of the sentiments shared in this article.

That said, while this seems to be a widespread phenomenon, my experience isn't necessarily the same as yours: I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts, ideas and insights on this topic.

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Those questions are open to anyone from the general TWS audience who may find this topic either timely or relevant, by all means feel free to chime in!

But I'm especially encouraging any of my fellow "productivity pr0n" enthusiasts who employ all sorts of methodologies and techniques like daily Pomodoro cycles and weekly Agile sprints or GTD project-plans for the month plus quarterly reviews etc etc in their jobs and/or life to keep themselves focused, effective and highly performant individuals:

• What's your work-life balance like? or is it actually a myth to pretend that there is any such a line of separation between the rat-race and your need or drive to hustle?
• In retrospect, has your mental-health and well-being suffered for constantly being under this state of daily+weekly+monthly+quarterly performance-pressure? Also is your sense of self-worth somehow tied to your net-worth (or some other metric of measurement indicative of how much value you output)?

Again, it's open to all, but I'm hoping to find others like me on here who perhaps owns a bunch of books dedicated to productivity and/or has a dedicated RSS feed for productivity blogs and/or has a Read It Later section tagged with productivity articles and/or has a notbook full of book and article highlights as well as personal scribbles on how to be more productive and/or listens to podcasts on productivity and/or is in a Discord or Slack community centered on productivity and/or have taken courses on productivity and/or have started their own accountability group to encourage my fellow peers and underclassmen with weekly coaching on productivity... as if I somehow knew more than them lmaoooo I'm just caught up in this craze that's it, point, blank, period.

If I'm the only freak who got this hooked on phonics productivity and all the meta-strategies one could take towards that end -- feel free to ignore those last few questions. But... I have the sneaking suspicion that some of y'all got bit by this bug too. Perhaps not as bad as me lol but I'm willing to bet that some of y'all have books/blogs/whatever on the topic bookmarked in the name of self-betterment -- when, potentially, there's an element of self-sacrifice at play here "but it's in the name of productivity and producing profits so don't question the American capitalistic worker-drone dream" ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ